You Manage It! 2: Ethics/Social Responsibility Helping Employees Take Care of Home Tasks

A recent trend is for companies to actively try to help employees improve life at home, with many of these companies claiming that this is a form of social responsibility toward their employees, sometimes referred to as “internal stakeholders.” According to management professor David Lewis at UCLA, this represents “a growing effort by American business to reward people with time and peace of mind instead of more traditional financial tools like stock options and bonuses.” Consider the following:

  • ▪ Evernote, a software company, pays each of its 250 employees—from receptionists to top executives—to have their homes cleaned twice a month.

  • ▪ Facebook provides each employee who becomes a new parent with $4,000 to help with expenses.

  • ▪ Stanford School of Medicine offers doctors not only housecleaning but also in-home dinner delivery.

  • ▪ Genentech helps parents with take-home dinners, housecleaning, and last-minute babysitting for a sick child.

  • ▪ Deloitte, the consulting firm, offers employees a wide array of family support services including backup care for workers with sick family members, personal trainers, nutritionists, and 24-hour counseling services “on demand” for family-related problems such as marital strife and infertility.

  • ▪ Patagonia, a clothing company based in Ventura, California, is legendary for its environmental focus. It is beloved by its employees, who enjoy an almost unparalleled degree of autonomy and flexibility. According to its CEO Yvon Chouinard, for every opening at Patagonia, the company has an average of 900 applicants. With a high percentage of women employees, the company tries to offer perks that are particularly attractive to working women. In the words of Chouinard, “One gets pregnant, I can’t afford to lose her. The average cost to replace an employee is $50,000, including headhunter fees, lost productivity, training. So I say, put in child care. Give people flextime. Let my people go breastfeeding, for God’s sake. Before we had a child care center, employees came to work with their babies and kept them on their desks in cardboard boxes.”

Critical Thinking Questions

  1. 10-18. Do you think companies provide these types of family-oriented rewards for altruistic reasons? Do you see this as a trend? Explain.

  2. 10-19. Do you think employees who take advantage of these forms of family-assistance support truly value these services more than they would an equivalent amount in take-home pay? Explain.

  3. 10-20. If you had a choice of working for a firm that offers you a higher wage but little in the way of family support services versus a firm that offers you a lower wage but better family support services, which one would you pick and why? Explain.

Team Exercise

  1. 10-21. Form teams of five. Each team is to develop a proposal for a medium-size company in the retail, hospitality, transportation, or manufacturing sectors to provide family-support rewards to employees. Team members should consider some of the rewards discussed in the case opening and decide in favor of or against this idea. Each team will make recommendations in class. The instructor will serve as a mediator for the discussion.

Experiential Exercise: Team

  1. 10-22. Role-play a human resources manager trying to convince the company CEO and two of his executives (role-played by three students) that introducing some of the rewards discussed in the case opening is good for the firm. The CEO and the two executives should ask probing questions of the HR manager about the wisdom of introducing such a program. Alternatively, the instructor may play the role of CEO.

Experiential Exercise: Individual

  1. 10-23. Research firms that have introduced some of the family-support rewards programs discussed in the case opening. What, if anything, do these firms have in common? Is there sufficient evidence to recommend offering this type of reward for employees in other organizations? Justify your conclusions.

Sources:Based on www.dss.gov.au ; www.man4soft.com/evernote . (2013); www.gene.com . (2013); www.deloitte.com . (2013); Rithtel, M., 2012. Housecleaning, then dinner? Silicon Valley perks come home. www.nytimes.com ; Best small-business workplaces. (2013). www.entrepreneur.com ; Giving back as a company. (2011). www.inc.com ; A little enlightened self-interest. (2011). www.inc.com ; Special financial report: Employee compensation. (2011). www.inc.com .
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